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How come the left brain doesn’t complain about the fact that it is no longer conscious of things on the left side of space? Imagine having your brain… - Michael S. Gazzaniga
" "How come the left brain doesn’t complain about the fact that it is no longer conscious of things on the left side of space? Imagine having your brain disconnected. Imagine waking up in your hospital room the next morning and, as your surgeon walks in to see how you are faring, you only see the left half of her face. Don’t you think you would notice that the right half is not there? The thing is, you would not. In fact, your left hemisphere wouldn’t even be conscious of the fact that there is a left half of space. But this is the weird part: I spoke as if the new, split version of you were just your left hemisphere, and that is not true. You are also your right hemisphere. The new “yous” have two minds with two completely separate pools of perceptual and cognitive information. It is just that only one of the minds can readily speak. The other initially cannot. Perhaps, after many years, it will be able to produce a few words.
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About Michael S. Gazzaniga
Michael S. Gazzaniga (born December 12, 1939) is an American neuroscientist, author and professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he heads the new SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Also Known As
Native Name:
Michael Steven Gazzaniga
Alternative Names:
Gazzaniga, M.S.
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M. S. Gazzaniga
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Michael S Gazzaniga
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Gazzaniga, Michael S.
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Additional quotes by Michael S. Gazzaniga
Amid great anticipation, Giacomo slowly lowered the electrode into the callosum. As is commonly done in neurophysiology, the recording system was hooked up to a loudspeaker so that the rat-tat-tat of the neurons firing could be heard. We were ready to hear the Morse code of the brain.
Then it happened. The electrode pierced the callosum. Instead of the rat-tat-tat we expected, the loudspeaker boomed with the excruciatingly clear voice of Ringo Starr singing, “We all live in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine.” Giacomo looked up from the cat and calmly said, “Now that is what I call high-order information.” Some kind of electronic ground loop had been closed, and we were picking up the local radio station. We all laughed, though we knew this brain code thing was going to be a long haul.
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It was also the test that produced the most astounding observation of all. The left, talking brain didn’t seem to miss the right brain, and vice versa. It didn’t just not miss it — it didn’t even remember it or the functions it had performed, as if the right hemisphere had never existed. For me, this phenomenon is the single most important fact students of mind/brain research must take into account.
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